Wednesday, August 16, 2006

The Machinery of Explanation

Children start life unable to speak but quickly learn the language of their culture. It has been remarked that the actual contact time children have with a language does not in itself provide enough information for them to make sense of it from scratch. It seems therefore that newborn humans have an innate understanding of some basic linguistic constructs. These constructs act as template categories and the particulars of a given language rapidly fall into the template slots as children learn. In short, human beings have prior expectations about how language works and these expectations, if fulfilled, speed along the process of language learning. (See Pinker)

It is likely that humans also have prior expectations in a more general sense about the “syntax and semantics” of the wider world. For it seems that we are primed to proactively make sense of situations in as much as we organize incoming data in order to fit the theory we have, or are in the process of developing. We expect the world to make a modicum of sense and this expectation helps to catalyze the process of learning. However, there is a trade-off here: Our readiness to find theoretical narratives behind the events around us imputes a propensity to find them even when they are not there. It’s a bit like the faces we see in the clouds – we are innately sensitive to the face configuration and we are therefore inclined to see them in places where there are no faces. The hazard of human theoretical creativity is that it is in constant danger of taking off into the wilder blue yonder and into the realm of fantasy. Garfinkel’s experiment, which I mentioned in the last post, bears this out.

What helps to control the fires of human theoretical creativity and keep it anchored to the real world is that circumstances often force theoretical narratives to be used in an anticipatory way. Although this check is not foolproof, it certainly helps. The child who quickly makes sense of the complex stream of language is rewarded when that learning is confirmed by successful anticipation of the meanings intended by fellow humans. In contrast, however, we note that the patients in Garfinkel’s experiment were not asked to anticipate the therapist’s responses in advance. Reckoning day never came and the patient did not have to put his money where his thoughts were. Each new response was fitted into a growing theoretical elaboration.

There is much to be said for Gregory Chaitin's view that theories are a form of data compression. That is, theoretical narratives are very succinct expressions that can be used to inform us about the outcome of a large number of experimental cases. If Chaitin is right then Garfinkel’s patients where engaged in an impossible task; that is, of trying to “compress” a random sequence into a succinct narrative explaining the therapists random replies. As each random ‘yes’ or ‘no’ comes in the patient has to incorporate it into his explanation of what is going on, and this requires that the patient, in order to keep track of the irreducible complexities of randomness, must elaborate an explanation that has an equal complexity. As long as the patient is prepared to keep elaborating his explanation of what is going in order to fit an apparently random output, no compression of concept is actually taking place - it is simply a fancy way of recording the data, with no real attempt at radical anticipation of any fundamental underlying logical structure constraining a whole edifice of potential output. The patient was, in effect, acting a bit like one of the conspiracy theorists of our time, who succeed in retrospectively accounting for all sorts of behavior by simply elaborating the conspiracy theory via the addition of further characters, motives and what have you. Seldom does the conspiracy theorist put his theory to real use and launch out with some honest theoretical risk taking by using his theory to generate (that is, anticipate) further incoming data.

To my mind Chaitin is right on at least one count. Right because much of our world, particularly in physics, is organized to yield to those natural philosophers who seek compressed explanatory narratives. However, the fact that Garfinkel’s patients succeeded in retrospectively interpreting random data is testimony to just how complex the socio-personal world is – it is so complex that it can be used to account for random configurations. Although the patients ultimately put together spurious explanatory narratives, the potential is clearly there: The socio-personal world is complex enough for patients to assemble its many elements and variables in order to produce at least a plausible explanation for an ostensibly random output, and this is evidence of just how complex objects are humans and their societies. Unlike physics the starting point of socio-personal explanations is the most complex things in the cosmos, namely human beings and society. As is often the case when we are dealing with the socio-personal, such as, say, trying to account for simple scene of crime clues, the explanation of the simple is found in the complex purposes of human beings and the condition of society as a whole; in fact we have here an inversion of the physical paradigm: In the latter simple physical principles explain complex physical outputs, but in the social sciences complex socio-personal constructs may be used to account for simple events. In short, Chaitin’s ideas, although certainly very useful, are not comprehensive.

But the socio-personal world is not the only context where complex entities are used as an explanatory framework. In spite of the fact that much of physics yields to Chaitin’s notion that theories are ways of compressing complex physical data, it is precisely in physics that we find a hard case of theoretical incompressibility. We have, of course, the well known random outputs of quantum mechanics, which as far as we yet know are irreducibly random. Although the statistics of quantum mechanics are constrained by various quantum equations, nevertheless particular outputs have a random element and we have to proceed as did Garfinkel’s patients – each real quantum output event is what it is, and has to be taken at face value and simply recorded as part of the complex sequence of random data of which it is part.

Coming Soon: American Antigravity, Tim Ventura and the Philadelphia Experiment.

THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION

“Ideas Versus Experience!" is a slogan expressing the uneasy relation between what we think the world to be and what our actual experience suggests it is. Experience makes or breaks ideas. But the reverse is also true: Well established ideas can influence the recognition, acceptance and even the perception of experience. In short there is a two way dialogue between ideas and experience. Sometimes that dialogue can turn into an argument, even a row.

The success of Science is based on a formalisation of this potentially contentious relationship as it seeks to support or refute theoretical notions by systematically comparing them with experience. In the far less formalized contexts of daily living we probably are using a similar heuristic when we display a tendency to drop ideas that lose the confrontation with experience, and retain those that win. Winning ideas, like the gladiators of the Roman arenas, live to fight another day. This Darwinian slant on the struggle for ideological survival is itself ideology that must, for consistency sake, submit itself to the very process it purports to describe. For example, it should be able to give account of the resilience of traditional theories in the face of contra indicators. And in the extreme, explanation also needs to be given of how conspiracy theorists continue to hold on to a ramifying structure of untested elaborations.

Human theoretical visions are often grand and sweeping, confidently affirming states of affairs that are far beyond immediate sensation. The vast unseen domains covered by our best theories contrasts with the limitations on human perceptual resources, resources that only allow a very sparse experimental sampling of our most ambitious ideas. Even a professional scientist only ever tests a small portion of any theoretical structure. Moreover, our theoretical concepts are ambitious enough to cover unreachable areas like the center of distant stars, sub-atomic dimensions, events long past into history, and very complex inscrutable objects like the human mind and its societies. Thus, science is metaphysical in as much as it has to admit that it covers vast domains inaccessible to testing in practice if not in principle. For the intelligent layman even the keyhole view of the experimental scientist may not be available. So whence comes the authority to affirm ideas that are often so grandiose in their sweep that they make claim to impinge upon the very meaning of life the universe and everything?

The fact is that for most of us the really big ideas diffuse through to us from our societal context, and at most these big ideas are only illuminated here and there, at a very few places, with actual direct experience of the phenomenon they conceptualise. These big ideas float around in the ether-like-media of society in the form of books, lectures, programmes, and the Internet etc, objects that the postmodernist philosophers call "texts".

For someone such as myself the battle to make sense of life was joined as soon as I was aware of mystery. But looking back it is clear to me that I haven't done an honest scientific experiment in the whole of my life. For me the effort to bring sense and integration to the complexity of life boils down to grappling with the many texts of society; These texts carry both big theoretical ideas and raw data from which ideas crystallize. These texts are compared with other texts in the search for coherence and consistency. These texts take the place and role of experiments as one tests theories using texts. These texts are in effect the experience of life. My own modest attempt at grandiose theorising has already been presented to the world. (See this blog "Physics and the Wild Web") and my excuse is that I have simply inherited the theoretical hubris of the human race.

The postmodern philosopher Jacques Derrida said, "There is nothing outside the text". I think he was at least right about the primary role texts play in the life of those like myself whose instinct has been to grapple relentlessly with the riddles of life, and to seek out meaning and go where no man has gone before. But one could equally claim, "There is nothing outside the experience". For one might read the "text" of the clouds in the sky as a predictor of impending weather just as one reads socially generated symbolic configurations as the predictor of certain kinds of thought or potential experience. For the text is just as much an experience as more primeval phenomenon like thunder and lightning. Texts are part of our cosmic experience and they imperceptibly grade into the more conventional notion of experience. Where the crossover point is, is difficult to say.

Postmodernism may have got it right about the primary role of the text, but it has made one very serious mistake. Where I would radically differ from the postmodern view is that I believe the mass of social texts, if we allow them, naturally converge upon grand consistent narratives and those narratives are here to stay. And that is because these texts, I submit, are part of a world with an underlying rational integratedness and that integratedness is being revealed to us bit by bit. For revelation it is: Revelation is what we cannot discover unless God chooses that we discover it. My perceptions and reason, limited though they may be, were not self-made, they had to be discovered as gifts. These gifts are given to all of us; one can but trust and use them. Reason is a grace of Revelation. For this reason the hubris of theory making is justified.